3par Powershell Example

HP has amazing product called 3par but it’s definitely lucking some features on add-on software side.

One of the products HP offers is called HP 3PAR Recovery Manager Software for Microsoft SQL Server (RM-SQL). Purpose of this software is to provide rapid on-site “backup” and not DR (in my experience majority of folks in HP don’t understand what this product does). I am not going into details how this software works but to give you a brief summary: it uses 3PAR hardware VSS provider to create application consistent snapshots and replicates them to another remote 3PAR SAN or stores them on 3PAR SAN locally.

You might think it does achieve objectives of DR but don’t be fooled. You are unable to restore replicated snapshots to a DR SQL server – the can only be restored to the same SQL server (you need to zone the same server to both 3PAR systems). Silly if you ask me as it seems to be solo software restriction.

Our objective for this exercise is DR for physical SQL servers hosted on 3PAR SAN. Additionally, we need to achieve low RTO and RPO. I am not describing on how to configure HP 3PAR RM-SQL to get data across to DR site.

The following Powershell script requires HP 3PAR CLI 3.1.3 installed. Additionally, DR server needs to have WINRM enabled (winrm quickconfig) and appropriate permissions for account (local administrators) under which you will be executing this script.